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The Narwhal’s Tale: Surviving Sea Ice Change
Narwhals breathing in a lead at the surface. Photo by Glenn Williams, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons . The Twin Otter plane that carries Kristin Laidre two hundred kilometers off the west coast of Greenland has Plexiglass bubble windows installed on both sides of the cabin. When Laidre peers through the glass, she can see the blank expanses of ice and snow covering the ocean’s surface in all directions, including directly beneath her. That’s where Laidre, a marine mammal biologist at the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center , has trained her eyes to look—down at the cracks of open water that blemish the otherwise pristine fields of ice. It’s often tedious work, playing “I spy a narwhal,” but when she catches sight of the whale, it makes the waiting worthwhile.A sea change in the Arctic atmosphere
In the dim light of early spring in the Arctic, a high-resolution digital camera on a NASA research plane shot the photo below while flying over the Arctic Ocean. The photo documents what polar scientists mean when they describe the “thinning blanket” of sea ice Across the Arctic Ocean. Compared to older, thicker ice (left), the young, thin ice (right) is more transparent, with numerous cracks and openings.
Northeast Joins Drought, Spring 2012
Jake Crouch, Climate Monitoring Branch of the National Climatic Data Center Since the beginning of 2012, drought conditions have worsened along the eastern seaboard, adding to a dry picture for much of the United States. One way to think about drought is by how much rain falls over a long period of time. This map shows the difference from the expected amount of rain that fell in the continental United States from January through April.
Since the beginning of 2012, the contiguous United States has been experiencing drier than average conditions. This lack of precipitation is affecting water availability for agriculture and municipal use, as well as increasing concerns about soil quality and wildfires. The map above shows the percent of average precipitation across the United States from January – April.
A dry beginning for 2012 across much of U.S.
Alabama grower Myron Johnson talking with Wendy-Lin Bartels, an anthropologist with the Southeast Climate Consortium. Photo by Brian Kahn. The North Florida Research and Education Center is a collection of dated-looking, low-slung buildings surrounded by fields that look like anywhere else. Yet in early February this year, this average-looking experimental farm an hour outside of Tallahassee was home to a remarkably innovative gathering. Shortly before 9 a.m, Wendy-Lin Bartels, an anthropologist with the Southeast Climate Consortium, was at the center welcoming farmers, extension agents, and climate and agriculture researchers as they trickled in from Alabama, Georgia, and Florida.
Innovative Farmers Look to Climate Forecasts for an Edge
ClimateWatch Magazine » Dry, Warm Spring No Help for Southern Drought
Since late 2010, much of the southernmost United States has been suffering through drought. When conditions reached their peak last summer, the resulting impacts were devastating, shrinking water supplies for cattle and crops, and contributing to huge agricultural losses. This spring, drought continues to plague large portions of the South. The U.S.
William Birdsong: We’re headed just northwest of Headland, Alabama. We’re going to Myron Johnson’s farm. He’s a local farmer in this area. He’s very innovative. Myron Johnson: Behind us we have a wheat crop. To look at it and see what its potential is is really exciting.
ClimateWatch Magazine » Expanding on the Almanac: Farmer’s Bet on Climate Forecast Pays Off
Kirk Brock: We got a thousand acres we grow—and it’s all dry land—so we have to consciously think about water. We get rainfall in this area. We get almost 60 inches a year typically. But it’s that time between rainfalls that we’re trying to use cover crops and conservation tillage to mitigate those 30-day periods of dry weather– maybe 14 day periods of drought. Wendilyn Bartels: Farmers have always been paying attention to the weather and the climate.
ClimateWatch Magazine » Droughts & Downpours: Harvesting Rain on a Dryland Farm
Sea surface temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean swing back and forth every few years (sometimes more) like an irregular pendulum. The warm phase is known as El Niño; the cool phase—which it has been in for the past two winters—is called La Niña. According to NOAA’s April 2012 ENSO Diagnostics Discussion , La Niña is fading and will likely be over by the end of April. The pair of maps shows the difference from average temperature in the tropical Pacific near the winter peak of the La Niña event on January 12 and on April 15. Places where the ocean was up to 5 degrees Celsius colder than the 1981-2010 average are dark blue, average temperatures are white, and places where temperatures were up to 5 degrees C warmer than average are red.
ClimateWatch Magazine » La Niña fading, likely gone by end of April
ClimateWatch Magazine » Record Heat, March 2012
Deke Arndt, Chief of the Climate Monitoring Branch, National Climatic Data Center. You’re watching daily temperature records being broken–and in some places shattered–day by day during March of 2012. And you can see them migrate in waves across the country. And when you consider both high temperatures and low temperatures, we had more than 15,000 of these records broken during the month. That’s a lot compared to a normal month, and that’s a lot even compared to previous heat waves.This is the first in a new series inspired by the Climate Q&A blog on NASA’s Earth Observatory. Although solar flares, and associated coronal mass ejections , can bombard Earth’s outermost atmosphere with tremendous amounts of energy, most of that energy is reflected back into space by the Earth’s magnetic field. Because the energy does not reach our planet’s surface, it has no measurable influence on surface temperature. The heat wave that affected the eastern and central United States in March 2012 coincided with a flurry of solar eruptions, and it’s not unreasonable to wonder if such events are related.
ClimateWatch Magazine » Do solar storms cause heat waves on Earth?
ClimateWatch Magazine » It’s official: March 2012 warmth topped the charts
Record and near-record breaking temperatures dominated the eastern two-thirds of the nation and contributed to the warmest March for the contiguous United States since records began in 1895. More than 15,000 warm temperature records were broken during the month. The average temperature of 51.1°F was 8.6 degrees above the 20th century average. In the past 117 years, only one month (January 2006) has ever been so much warmer than its average temperature.ClimateWatch Magazine » March storms pile up to 9 feet of new snow onto Cascades
As March began, people living the eastern United States were enjoying warmer temperatures, budding flowers, and other signs of the approaching spring season. But on the opposite coast, winter was not yet over. In the first two weeks of March, a series of storms tracked down the coast of Alaska and through the Pacific Northwest and piled between 4 and 9 feet of new snow on the already deep powder on the western slopes of the Cascades in Washington.According to NOAA's 2012 Spring Outlook, odds are that dry conditions and above-average temperatures will persist in much of the South, prolonging the historical drought event in 2011 that resulted in significant economic impacts. Meanwhile, last year's most devastating flood events are unlikely to repeat due to limited winter snowfall and mountain snowpack. The maps above show probabilities of well above or well below normal temperature and precipitation in the continental United States for April – June 2012, according to the official forecast issued by the Climate Prediction Center on March 15. Locations where the odds favor well above or well below normal temperatures are shaded in red or blue; precipitation outlooks are shown in shades of green (well above normal) and brown (well below normal).
ClimateWatch Magazine » Spring 2012 climate outlook favors warm, dry conditions in South
On average, the 2011-2012 winter was a mild one for the contiguous United States. When NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center crunched the numbers for December, January and February—”meteorological” winter for 2011-2012—it stacked up as the fourth warmest of the past 117 winters. The seasonal average temperature was 36.8 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 3.9 degrees above the 20th century average.
ClimateWatch Magazine » U.S. has fourth warmest winter on record; West & Southeast drier than average
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